Early words

Thus, easier for them to learn the words, as they can get the clues from the sounds of the objects themselves

One-to-one relation (i.e. the specific car in the family="car", or 1 object=1 name )

Children believe that names and the referents are intrinsically related: thus, they cannot change the name without changing its nature as well---e.g. dog=cow, then dog will moo!

Mental Images

Meaning is a mental representation or "concept": some words are picturable/ mentally visualized, whereas others do not have a picturable referent

Mental images tend to be particularistic or idiosyncratic, e.g. "house" could look like a brick bungalow or a colonial

Meaning has to be a social construct---to be useful for communication

How do children acquire meaning?

Children acquire meaning through:

1) forming "categorical" concepts, e.g. "animals" is a mental category, and the word"dog" belongs to it

2) Extending that word to appropriate new items of that category, e.g. cat, elephant etc.

How do children acquire meaning?

Two ways children may possibly be forming these categorical concepts:

Semantic Feature view: set of distinguishing features (First, one object=one label, thus "Bingo" may be "dog", but later learn that other creatures are dogs too--as long as they share a critical set of features). Children form these categories by weighting the features to include any given word in that category--thus barking is weighted more than four-leggedness

Prototype theory:

 First, children acquire prototypes/core concepts when they acquire meaning for a category,

 Only later they realize there are other allowable members that may not be as close to the prototype, and still can be included in that same category

 E.g. Prototypical fruit=apple; animal=dog; flowers=roses

 Classical concepts (triangle); probabilistic concepts (birds), i.e.no single set of essential features and can range from robin to penguins

Some other meaning-related points...

Why children name red and blue so easily? (these focal colors are prototypical members of "color")

Other non-focal color names are difficult (fuzzy boundaries even for adults); whereas no problem categorizing different dogs under "animals"

The theories of how meanings are acquired

Learning theory

Simplest explanation, explains how children learn the meanings of their first words through associative learning

Repeated exposure to a stimulus/word (e.g. "kitty"), paired with a particular experience (seeing the cat), results in the associative link between the sound and the referent

This explains the earliest and simplest links b/w words and objects

Children are especially sensitive to "novel" stimuli, and thus apply new words to new objects around them

Most early words are of concrete objects, such as "bottle" or "blanket"

Limitations: Exclusive reliance on this simple association would result in slow, effortful, idiosyncratic and erroneous learning---which is not what we see in children (they are fast, predictable and accurate!)---so simple associative learning may not be enough

Theories...contd.

Developmental theory

Semantic development is probably part of the bigger picture: dev. of social, cognitive and linguistic skills

Earlier, ontological/basic categories are forming---ideas about how the world is organized--categories of objects, events, relations, states, and properties

How does understanding of meaning change?

A single label "dog" can apply to the family dog, barking, dog's tail, or the picture of a dog

Children learn to identify the different referents based on adults' attentional and intentional states

Thus, as they learn to maintain joint focus of attention with adults, they start learning words

Theories....contd.

Fast mapping

Children make the word-referent associations after only a few exposures, and without explicit instruction--this is fast mapping

So, what are they learning so fast? How many exposures required? How long do they remember this new word? Are different words learnt equally fast? Are there age differences? Is this different from direct teaching?

Findings: children remember the associations even a week later, and upto a month even if not exposed to that sound again, exposure over several days better than many exposures on the same day, 2 yrs + nouns may be learnt equally well implicitly or w/ direct teaching

Lexical Principles of Fast-mapping:Assumptions that children may work on during fast mapping

Words refer to objects: person, place or thing (e.g. Look/ Mira)

Words refer to whole objects: e.g. "dog" may not apply to dog's tail/ "bone" may be the the whole dog

New words can be extended to other members of the same category: e.g. crackers can be "cookies", or all 4-legged creatures are "doggie"

Each object can have only one name: e.g. "bone" can't be the dog's name, as he already has a name

Lexical Principles of Fast-mapping: (contd...)

New words refer to categories that do not already have a name: e.g. "bone" must be rug etc...

No two words have exactly the same meaning: e.g. "Rufus" and "bone" can't be the same referent

These assumptions change with increasing linguistic and world knowledge and understanding of discourse context

Their initial associations may be incorrect, but later corrected with adults' input and feedback, and making them review their label-referent mappings/associations

Study of vocabularies

Diaries

Checklists

Early word vocabulary

Early words: those that are intellectually and socially most meaningful to them--e.g. names of imp. people and objects in their lives